Life Is a Winding Road

One of the hardest things to go through is change. No matter what it is, leaving the comfort of normal is a scary thing.

Even if you’ve gotten a promotion at work, it’s still very scary. Losing a job is scary as hell. Finding the new job is scary as hell. And when you finally find that new job, it’s ridiculously scary. The fear doesn't just come with employment, it comes with life. It comes with meeting someone new that you're interested in, breaking up with someone or even worse, when you lose a family member. Regardless of what change you're going through, what will make or break you is how you deal with the change, how your attitude guides you through.

To this point in my life, the biggest change I’ve had to go through was losing my father. A lot of what I’m about to write is difficult to admit. I love my dad. I love him maybe more now than when he was here. I look back now and he did do his job, he helped mold me into the person I’ve become. Just maybe not in the most traditional way.

I'm at I was 23 years old when I lost my father. He had been sick since I was Eighteen. I was so confused. I didn't know anything about life but I thought I did. I thought the life lessons that my father taught me were enough to get me through, boy I was I wrong.

Safe to say that the things that he taught me were valuable, but as I've learned since I've gotten older, he taught me what not to do. One of my Dad's famous sayings, was "Do as I say, not as I do."

Try being a child and understanding that. As a typical son, all I wanted to do was be like my father, wrong lesson learned. Even after he passed, and though I knew deep down that I shouldn't be like him I thought that I had to honor him and his life by letting myself become like him, and using his death as a crutch.

During my childhood, my dad ruled the house with an iron fist. It was his way or the highway. It was a tense household. You never knew what would set him off. For example, when he would come home from work, I’d open the door for him. There were days that I get reamed because I didn’t do it right or I got in his way or some other ridiculous reason.

Although the house was tense and scary, he was still my hero. I looked up to him. He set the example, I wanted to follow it. I thought that was what a son was supposed to do. Even when shit got really bad, I still looked up to him.

I won’t go into some of the other shit that went on, but the example that was set was a bad one. With all of that, when I was eighteen visiting my sister in Virginia, and we got the call that something happened during a routine procedure, I freaked out.

We rushed home the next morning and went right to the hospital and there was my dad laying in a coma, tubes, and wires coming out of him from every possible direction. I couldn't look at him. I walked in gasped and walked out. From that day forward all I did was shy away from what was reality. Long story short, he came out of the coma, way different than the person I once knew.

My father, who was as mean and as stern as you can imagine for the first eighteen years of my life changed. He came out of his coma and his personality was a complete one-hundred-eighty-degree turn. All he cared about was his wife and his kids.

"I love my wife, I love my kids" is what he would say. Me, I couldn't handle it. I couldn't look at him. I couldn't understand what happened. Looking back this is where I really started to handle things really shitty.

I took my frustration and anger out in a very passive aggressive sarcastic way. I engulfed myself in my jobs, or school, or the college radio station. Nobody had any idea what was going on at home. But for me, all I knew is that everything at home was upside down. I was so angry. I became arrogant, I was trying to hide the pain that I was in by putting up a good front.

Little did I know that I was becoming like him before he got sick. I remember physically fighting a friend of mine at school because of a joke he made. I literally threw him across a room. This was not who I've ever been. This was the only time that I got physical with anyone but the arrogance, and sarcasm kept on going. Looking back now, I had some great friends in school, I honestly don't know why.

I graduated college and came home. Nothing really changed with him. I still couldn't look at him. Here was a man that I once feared, now to me that had the mentality of a toddler. It fucked me up big time. This is around the time that I started my short-lived radio career.

A few months after my dad had a massive heart attack. There is a story about that night that I should tell but I'm just not ready to. Somehow he survived, but now he was just worse way worse. The more his health deteriorated the more I vanished. The "busier" I made myself.

I lived at work, I worked extra appearances, I stayed out, I did anything I could to escape my reality. Oh, and that sarcastic, arrogant asshole that I was, became way worse. I would talk back to people, I would snap and yell. I would tease and joke. I did whatever I could to block out what was really going on. Anything to make me feel better.

I had a rare day off, I was home. My father was home, bedridden, he called me up to his room. I reluctantly went upstairs. He said to me "I'm not going to be around much longer, you have to be the man of the house and take care of your mother and sisters." I responded very poorly, as I did with most things at that time in my life.

I said, "you're not going anywhere." I turned around and walked out of the room. I don't know how he felt after I did that, all I knew was that I wasn't ready to deal with what was going on. It wasn't more than a few weeks or even days after that, he was gone. I was staring the biggest change of my life in the face. I chose to deal with the loss in the wrong way, and I did it for a long time.

Picture how my attitude changed after he passed. It became so much worse. Aside from scared, sad, angry, I became something much worse, entitled. That attitude was evident from one side of a room to another. I can remember it as clear as day. I would get spoken to by a supervisor, or a friend about my attitude, about how I was treating people, about client complaints whatever.

My reaction would be, but my Dad died, I'm having a hard time. This would buy me some time as far as repercussions, eventually, that time would run out and whatever the situation was would come to pass. Also known as, I would lose jobs, friends, love interests. I never realized that the lessons that were trying to be taught to me were you need to change. I was trying to honor him, by being a hardass like he was. And I wondered why I everyone didn't love me.

Like I said earlier, I used my father's death as a crutch or an excuse. How could I be a bad person after what I had just dealt with? The way that I encountered my change was I felt like I was isolated in the world. That NO ONE else ever dealt with the loss of a parent. That I was special, that I should be handled with care. I looked for people to cater to me because of my loss. I wallowed in it.

I didn't accept anything as my own. I didn't become "the man of the house" or the man of anything for that matter. I was just an amoeba just floating along.

Fast forward to me being about 34 years of age. I finally had a grasp on things. I finally realized who I was. I had a lot of time to accept my past, my relationship with my father, and started to learn the lessons that I was being taught. I realized that I didn't want to be like him.

It became evident that if I was I would succumb to the same fate that he did. I stopped using what happened as an excuse. I let go of the guilt (well most of it) that I carried around for how I behaved from the time that he was sick until the time that he passed.

My attitude towards life then changed. I started to look at things from bigger picture perspective. Things started to get better. I started to have success in friendships, work, and I was generally happy. I started to accept people for how they were, and I started learning from them. I found people in my life that I looked up to and I learned from them. I learned that the world wasn't against me but I was pushing the world away. The biggest lesson I learned was that I was not special because of what happened. I was one of many.

I never apologized for the way that I acted, maybe this is it, I don't know. What I do know is that though I may never had actually said it to the people that tried to help me, their voices did resonate with me. Their advice did hit home. It may have taken me longer to accept what happened from day one until the end, but I did learn my lessons.

Who's to say how long you should grieve or how long it should take to release your demons, is there a time frame? I guess there is, because until you realize that you are the one that controls your fate, that you are the only one that can change who your attitude, you will miss out on the wonderful things and people that life can offer.

Life can be a series of unfortunate events, or it can be one beautiful day after another. You may not win the lottery or you may fall ill. There will be ups and downs, there will be great news and sad news. How you react to any change in your life is what's important. You need to realize that your attitude and outlook is what will control what happens next. Your reflection of you is what's going against you, not the world.